Capitalism and Freedom

Milton Friedman argues that the appropriate role of competitive capitalism occurs when the majority of our economic activity flows through private enterprise within a free-market environment. This is unequivocally the most effective device for achieving economic freedom, as well as the necessary condition in which political freedom can be attained. Friedman's arguments are positively bold, enlightening, and impacting. Among the specific topics he addresses are "The Control of Money", "Fiscal Policy", "Capitalism and Discrimination", and "Social Welfare Measures".

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose, teamed up to write this most convincing and readable guide, which illustrates the crucial link between Adam Smith's capitalism and the free society. They show how freedom has been eroded and prosperity undermined through the rapid growth of governmental agencies, laws, and regulations.

The Great Contraction, 1929-1933

The Great Contraction, 1929-1933 argued that the Federal Reserve could have stemmed the severity of the Depression, but failed to exercise its role of managing the monetary system and ameliorating banking panics. This edition of the original text includes a new preface by Anna Jacobson Schwartz, as well as a new introduction by the economist Peter Bernstein.

The Indispensable Milton Friedman: Essays on Politics and Economics

Milton Friedman is one of the most famous economists in history. His writings and theories on everything from capitalism and freedom to deregulation and welfare have inspired movements, influenced government policies, and changed the course of America’s economic history. Now, acclaimed Friedman biographer Lanny Ebenstein brings together 20 of Friedman’s greatest essays in The Indispensable Milton Friedman: Essays on Politics and Economics.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe

In The Euro, Nobel Prize-winning economist and best-selling author Joseph E. Stiglitz dismantles the prevailing consensus around what ails Europe, demolishing the champions of austerity while offering a series of plans that can rescue the continent - and the world - from further devastation. Hailed by its architects as a lever that would bring Europe together and promote prosperity, the euro has done the opposite. As Stiglitz persuasively argues, the crises revealed the shortcomings of the euro.

Milton Friedman: A Guide to His Economic Thought

One of the great economists of the 20th century, Milton Friedman has always challenged the prevailing economic orthodoxy. At the same time, his work has become popular because it is engagingly written and because it helps in practical prediction. Thanks to Friedman, money is now regarded as a far more powerful factor than it had been before. It offers the prospect of permanently controlling the inflation that has become the most important economic problem of our age.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy

Something is wrong with our banking system. We all sense that, but Mervyn King knows it firsthand; his 10 years at the helm of the Bank of England, including at the height of the financial crisis, revealed profound truths about the mechanisms of our capitalist society. In The End of Alchemy, he offers us an essential work about the history and future of money and banking, the keys to modern finance.

The Wealth of Nations

The foundation for all modern economic thought and political economy, The Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of Scottish economist Adam Smith, who introduces the world to the very idea of economics and capitalism in the modern sense of the words.

The Road to Serfdom

Originally published in 1944, The Road to Serfdom has profoundly influenced many of the world's great leaders, from Orwell and Churchill in the mid-'40s, to Reagan and Thatcher in the '80s. The book offers persuasive warnings against the dangers of central planning, along with what Orwell described as "an eloquent defense of laissez-faire capitalism".

Basic Economics, Fifth Edition: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy

In this fifth edition of Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell revises and updates his popular book on commonsense economics, bringing the world into clearer focus through a basic understanding of the fundamental economic principles and how they explain our lives. Drawing on lively examples from around the world and from centuries of history, Sowell explains basic economic principles for the general public in plain English.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis

Since 2014, international monetary agencies have been issuing warnings to a small group of finance ministers, banks, and private equity funds: The US government's cowardly choices not to prosecute J.P. Morgan and its ilk and to bloat the economy with a $4 trillion injection of easy credit are driving us headlong toward a cliff. As Rickards shows in this frightening, meticulously researched book, governments around the world have no compunction about conspiring against their citizens.

Amazon Customer says:"worth reading for those interested in economics"

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era.

isaiah says:"The book is a great review of how we got to where we are today"

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception

Ever since Adam Smith, the central teaching of economics has been that free markets provide us with material well-being, as if by an invisible hand. In Phishing for Phools, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller deliver a fundamental challenge to this insight, arguing that markets harm as well as help us. As long as there is profit to be made, sellers will systematically exploit our psychological weaknesses and our ignorance through manipulation and deception.

America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

Until the election of Woodrow Wilson the United States - alone among developed nations - lacked a central bank. Ever since the Revolutionary War, Americans had desperately feared the consequences of centralizing the nation's finances under government control. However, in the aftermath of a disastrous financial panic, Congress was persuaded - by a confluence of populist unrest, widespread mistrust of bankers, ideological divisions, and secretive lobbying - to approve the landmark 1913 Federal Reserve Act.

The New Case for Gold

James Rickards is the most visible, vocal, and intelligent proponent for the gold standard today, and his unwavering stance on gold's value has drawn him hordes of lifelong fans. In The New Case for Gold, Rickards explains why gold is one of the safest assets for investors in times of political instability and market volatility and how every investor should look to add gold to his or her portfolio.

Monetarism and Supply Side Economics: Free Market Thought in the Late 20th Century

Dr. Arjo Klamer: Monetarism emerged in the 1960's under the leadership of Milton Friedman, who received the Nobel Prize in 1976. Friedman taught at the University of Chicago during this period, developing monetarism as a branch of Frank Knight's famous "Chicago School" of economics. Monetarists emphasize the role of money and the government's monetary policy in economic affairs; they vigorously defend the free market in their work.

Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years

Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

James C. Samans says:"Transformative to the point of being revolutionary"

The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath

In 2006, Ben S. Bernanke was appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, capping a meteoric trajectory from a rural South Carolina childhood to professorships at Stanford and Princeton, to public service in Washington's halls of power. There would be no time to celebrate, however - the burst of the housing bubble in 2007 set off a domino effect that would bring the global financial system to the brink of meltdown.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics

As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore the balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Friedrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous.

Anandasubramanian says:"An unbiased evaluation of both the major economist"

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism

Hayek gives the main arguments for the free-market case and presents his manifesto on the "errors of socialism." Hayek argues that socialism has, from its origins, been mistaken on factual, and even on logical, grounds and that its repeated failures in the many different practical applications of socialist ideas that this century has witnessed were the direct outcome of these errors. He labels as the "fatal conceit" the idea that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes."

Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective

In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Thomas Sowell, one of the foremost conservative public intellectuals in the country, argues that political and ideological struggles have led to dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. Pundits and politically motivated economists trumpet ambiguous statistics and sensational theories while ignoring the true determinant of income inequality: the production of wealth.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science

In this sharp, masterfully argued book, Dani Rodrik, a leading critic from within, takes a close look at economics to examine when it falls short and when it works, to give a surprisingly upbeat account of the discipline. Drawing on the history of the field and his deep experience as a practitioner, Rodrik argues that economics can be a powerful tool that improves the world - but only when economists abandon universal theories and focus on getting the context right.

A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II

In what is sure to become the standard account, Rothbard traces inflations, banking panics, and money meltdowns from the colonial period through the mid-20th century to show how government's systematic war on sound money is the hidden force behind nearly all major economic calamities in American history. Never has the story of money and banking been told with such rhetorical power and theoretical vigor. You will treasure this volume.

Publisher's Summary

What kind of mischief can result from misunderstanding the monetary system? The work of 2 obscure Scottish chemists destroyed the presidential prospects of William Jennings Bryan, as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to appease a few senators from the American West who helped communism triumph in China, are just 2 such mishaps cited in this important work by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.

This accessible work also provides an in-depth discussion on the creation of value: from stones to feathers to gold; the central role of monetary theory and how it can act to ignite or deepen inflation; and what the present monetary system means for both the domestic and global economy.

I was disappointed to discover that this well-written and adequately narrated title, listed as "unabridged," has one of its eleven chapters deliberately omitted by the audio producer. The missing chapter, four, explores what might have happened had the U.S. restored both gold and silver as monetary standards during post-war reconstruction in 1873, rather choosing only gold. Earlier and later passages occasionally refer to this missing chapter. More importantly, Friedman's thinking differs from standard wisdom on this issue. An announcement in the recording explains that those wishing to consider the omitted chapter must obtain the printed book and read it for themselves, suggesting that this material is too technical for a general reader. Perhaps Blackstone assumes that advanced readers do not use their products, or that general readers do not know how to skip ahead. Whatever the case, no book should be labeled "unabridged" if it has had a material amount of the author's prose removed.

This is a very close look at monetary systems from a surprisingly neutral position. Friedman is 100% apolitical in this analysis of the theory and practice of the phenomenon we call money. You'll no longer take it for granted after reading this book. Does it matter that the U.S. dollar is not tied to a gold exchange rate? What causes inflation? Why do currencies fluctuate in value against one another? These questions are answered in at least as much detail as the average reader will care to know. The book is sometimes repetetive and sometimes simply too deep (or maybe I'm just not quite bright enough to keep up with the author). But I felt it was a worthwhile listen, if for no other reason than I can now talk intelligently to my "gold-bug" brother about the subject of money.

This book delivers a whalloping punch into the art of monetary theory. Going over everything from stone-aged currencies to modern day, this is a guide to understanding how those little things in your pocket work.

The book is quite dry for the uneconomically inclined. I don't recommend this if you just want to make money either. There aren't any jewels of wisdom here for becoming a millionare just the theory that underpins what makes money work.

Excellent book for understanding money. I thought the audio quality was lacking though. I listen to books with an ipod plugged into my cars' sound system. There is just something about the recorded acoustics or how it was recorded that makes it very difficult to listen to in the car. I had to listen to it through my ipod and earplugs.

Milton Friedman has a way to make the technical aspects of economics, especially monetary policy, into an interesting story. He tells how a monetary standard impacts political power moves. Inflation becomes a character and not just a phenomenon. Clues to historical events are consequences of changes in the money supply.

The narrator I found to be very distracting. Her accent combined with higher pitched inflections was often painful to listen to. Not to mention she read it quite fast in parts. Since this is essentially a technical book, going quickly thru areas that may require more thought to absorb the content causes issue and rewinding quite often. Overall, I thought the book was great. Milton Friedman often reduces a complex topic down to a much more understandable and enjoyable learning task. I was disappointed by the choice to leave a chapter out though simply because they felt it was "too technical" for the listener.